Contemporary China offers a particularly interesting setting to study religious diversity as a result of its unique socio-political context. Based on the quantitative and qualitative evidence in a representative sample of Chinese dissertations, this essay identifies two characteristics associated with the usage of ‘religious diversity’ in contemporary Chinese scholarship: firstly, the focal poi...

Scientific interest in the cognitive underpinnings of religious belief has grown in recent years. However, to date, little experimental research has focused on the cognitive processes that may promote religious disbelief. The present studies apply a dual-process model of cognitive processing to this problem, testing the hypothesis that analytic processing promotes religious disbelief. Individua...

OBJECTIVE To examine the directionality of associations between self-reported religious importance or worship attendance and depression among adolescents, and to determine whether social supports or general self-efficacy are mechanisms of observed associations. METHOD A cohort (n = 976) of Canadian high school students were surveyed in Grade 10 (2000 to 2001) and 2 years later (2002 to 2003)....

The ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) abolished its total ban on religious activities in 1982. However, the distrust that the CCP feels for religions remains obvious today, and the religious restrictions in contemporary China remain tight. Conventional wisdom tells us that the official atheist ideology of Marxism-Leninism is the main reason behind the CCP’s distrust for, and restriction of, ...

BACKGROUND Hopelessness is a strong predictor of suicide which is closely associated with PTSD in war veterans. Previous studies showed that if religious faith in war veterans was weakened it contributed to more extensive current use of mental health services. War trauma experience can weaken religious faith as well as strengthen it. It partly depends on religious coping which can be positive o...

In the United States, charitable contributions can be deducted from taxable income making the price of giving inversely related to the marginal tax rate. The existing literature documents that charitable giving is very responsive to tax subsidies, but often ignores the spillover effects of such policies. This paper investigates the spillover effects of charitable subsidies on religious particip...

The aim of this study was to evaluate the structure and measurement invariance religious identity, practice, beliefs across cultures in six world regions (Asia, non-Western Europe, North America, Oceania, South Western Europe) Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic (WEIRD) non-WEIRD regions. Confirmatory factory analysis examined whether hypothesized model fits data; several multi-...

Previous literature on religion and sexual behavior has focused on narrow definitions of religiosity, including religious affiliation, religious participation, or forms of religiousness (e.g., intrinsic religiosity). Trends toward more permissive premarital sexual activity in the North American Christian-Judeo religion support the secularization hypothesis of religion, which posits an increasin...

Sociologists of the 19th and the 20th centuries were tackling the relation between science and religion. A few models of these relations were offered, by which the monopoly over the truth by any one of those is crashed. Therefore, there are a few models but each is with lots of limitations. None is sufficient to explain the relation between the science and religion, but each contributes to cert...